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unts writes "Taking DRM further than it's gone before, a group of designers have built a DRM'd chair that will melt its own joints and destroy itself after 8 uses. The chair uses an Arduino and sensors to monitor the number of uses, then triggers the melting of a set of joints that hold it together, making the product unusable without some carpentry skills. The video of device at work is both amusing and a little disconcerting."

Most are well beyond their "best before" date by the time they get elected. Since it's wasteful not to use them at all, I'd say give them a single chance. At least they'd be voting for something they "truly believe in". Given the current amount of actual change congress and the senate make happen lately, I doubt this limited use will have any true effect on the country at all.

i want the chair to record the lobyist that sit next to them and the amount of money they change hands.

How about one which also keeps totals for both lobyist and politician. With the ability to psudo-randomly eliminate (or teleport at least 14,000 km away) both of them. With the probability of doing so increasing the higher their totals. Now that would be a smart chair:)

All congressmen and senators have to use 1-legged stools instead of comfy chairs in session and committee meetings. They can rest, but they have to pay attention, and as they get older, they will get more and more annoyed with doing this and be more likely to stop running for office.

This could be applied to anything. Imagine if the whole world worked like the content mafia does and people don't get paid for the work they do but every time the result of that work is used.

You don't pay the plumber for the hours he worked, you pay a little for every time you sit on the toilet, every time you flush, etc. You don't pay the guy who tiled your kitchen, instead there's a micro transaction for every tile you step on. Couch in the living room ? Few cents every time you sit down.

And if your grandfather used to be a plumber, you'll get paid for his work until 90 years after his death.

DRM is properly thought of as Digital Restrictions Management, instead of Digital Rights Management. A good example of a previous DRM that implemented something like this is the limited edition DVD like disks that were being several years back. They were pushed by Disney and called Flexplay [wired.com] and only made for a couple years.

Remember DRM is all about restricting how something is used, even if that restriction requires the destruction of the devices. Many tamper resistant crypto chips will self destruct instead of letting a user access their data without restriction.

This is DRM. DRM is everything from country specific games to how many installs you can do total or at one time for a game.This tech installed in physical products would manage what you could do with them.

Or course it is not DIGITAL rights management (even if the circuit board used digital signals), but physical.

I have a store near me. It requires special paint around the parking lot. They failed to put that paint on the curbs, thus anybody with enough strength to push the cart through the landscaping, is able to steal one.

They do lock up. I know not because I tried taking a cart, but because I saw one just past the line once as I parked my car and decided to be nice and bring it back to the supermarket with me. The front wheels were locked until I got it back to the "correct" side of the line. Suddenly the wheels worked just fine.

That's designed to prevent door/window leaks. The idea was that the water would run down the tube and out an open hole to below the car. Modern cars can still have similar tubes; my car has 4 of them - one for each corner of the sunroof.

Took my 9 month old car in because the front brakes were grinding. They fixed that no problem but then came back and said 'now the rears needs to adjusted, that will be $90." I said flat out im not paying for a single repair on a car less then a year old. I seriously wanted to punch the guy in the face.

There isn't anything "digital" about a chair that needs rights management. You cannot use a chair multiple times by making a digital copy of it, nor can you transfer a digital copy of your chair to your friend. In fact the ability to use a chair requires that you physically have it. Now if this "rights management" somehow prevented you from making a *copy* of the chair, then it might be some kind of example, but it's certainly NOT an example of DRM.

Damn I'm getting old. I thought Flexplay [wikipedia.org] and DIVX [wikipedia.org] should be fresh in everyone's minds. But upon looking them up on wiki so I could link to them, I see they were 10 and 15 years ago respectively. So I guess this post will be informative for our younger readers. Anyway, those two forms of DRM worked almost exactly as the chair did - limiting you to 48 hours of use (rather than n number of uses). After the time was up, the disc became a coaster.

This will create thousands of jobs in the furniture industry. Congress should mandate that all new furniture on the market be self destructing to help the US industry. I know it would be mostly made in Asia, but it will be design by US high-tech companies (mostly, maybe) that one day will grow to be the Apple's or IBM's of the furniture industry. The world will envy us.

We need this to protect the livelihoods of furniture makers in America. This will save millions of jobs. Imagine the horror of a person buying a chair and using it upwards to an infinite amount of times!

I once "inherited" a cheap couch that was designed to cut through some foam padding after minimal use and become uncomfortable. I say it was intentional because it would take forethought and malice design a couch with metal wires against foam that would obviously fail in this fashion.

Planned obsolescence is generally a more passive process of picking components for a projected mean time between failure. Then when the device does fail it's often designed to be cheaper to replace than repair. This is typically caused by limited-life components (typically batteries) which almost universally degrade with age. A device that literally self destructs after a defined amount of use would fall under a different category to me (sabotage perhaps?). Regardless of what they call it though, I think th

Most of the sitters looked as if they were mounting a toilet and getting ready to take a big dump. It must have been fragile the way they all were being so gentle with it, and not one of them leaned against the back rest... cute idea though.

Let's say you were in a car with seatbelts that were guaranteed to fail after 30 miles, you don't think that even from miles 10-20 you wouldn't be a bit more cautious while driving?

It could be solid as a rock, but in your mind, you know there is a device which will cause